George Baily on Tumblr - Corporate helplines fallaciously assume we memorize their numbers

Tumblr is useful when all the things below happen at once:
- Stumbleupon gets arsey with your bookmarking and thinks you are a spammer;
- Twitter decides your sentence is too long for people;
- You want to share something but don't actually think it merits taking the effort to email the link to anyone.

Corporate helplines fallaciously assume we memorize their numbers

Barclays ad “you only need one number to access all your banking needs” presumably means horrible automated switchboards and much longer to find what you want. Why on earth should one number for all your needs be a good thing?

Why not just publish a long list of different phone numbers for every main category of enquiry? It’s not like it would be hard to understand, or hard to publish, or hard to save in our contact book, or hard to look up on online, or significantly more expensive. It would be faster and friendlier to get to speak to the department you need.

Unless of course keeping everyone waiting while racking up special rate phone number bills is part of the plan to fund the call centre in the first place.